The Sims

But Second Life wasn’t the only game in town when it came to living online. The November 25, 2002 issue of Time magazine included an article called Sim Nation, about the video game The Sims getting online capabilities. And the way Time talked about concerns surrounding online communities was accidentally prescient.

From Time magazine:

The Sims Online is a new virtual frontier. Is a video game just what this divided nation needs?

[…]

Next month, when video-game titan Electronic Arts launches The Sims Online, it will become something more than a game. Using the Internet, The Sims Online will enable millions of individual Sims to live, work and hang out together in a shared virtual world very much like our own. Result: a daring collective social experiment that could tell us some interesting things about who we are as a country. We’re about to witness the birth of Simulation Nation.

What were Americans so polarized about in the fall of 2002? The Iraq War, which the George W. Bush administration was laying the groundwork for. Between 52-59% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, according to Pew Research, while between 35-43% opposed. Bombs would start falling on Baghdad in March of 2003 and anywhere from 1 million to 2.4 million Iraqis died as a result of the war.

Needless to say, the U.S. is just as polarized today, with a truly unhinged Supreme Court gutting hard-won human rights that have been tremendously popular in the past 50 years. And social media is just as polarized, even if we’re not necessarily living in an alternate reality that looks like The Sims or Second Life.